The report also spoke of a fruitless search made to find her husband, who, the woman claimed, had deserted her in Russia and was now in New York. The investigator claimed that this was all a tissue of lies, that Mrs. Baum's husband was a myth, as the children whom she had questioned admitted never having had a "papa."
A certain Jewish paper in New York publishes daily the pictures of men who desert their families, and other details about them. In the report it was stated that the investigator asked Mrs. Baum for a picture of her husband, but the woman refused it, saying that she did not want to brand the father of her children. The report ended with the remark that the whole thing was a tissue of lies and demanded closer examination. It is interesting to know that the report was made by a new investigator, working in a district formerly entrusted to a woman with whom this investigator was at dagger points, because of some love affair. Later on, the same investigator spoke about Mrs. Baum's severe illness and the temporary removal of the children to an orphan asylum.
The pension was kept up for eighteen more months, then suddenly discontinued. When I read this I tried to think out the reason for the discontinuance. Was the woman placed in a hospital for incurables? Had she fallen? Had she found her husband? The discontinuance dated eight months prior to my reading of the report, and although I knew how many times one can change his abode in New York, still I set out to hunt the woman up. For more than a week I spent every moment I could spare trying to trace her, but without success. In despair, I wrote ten letters, the first three to the addresses I knew and on the rest of them I just inscribed her name and the name of one of the lateral streets of the lower East Side. In the letter I wrote a few words asking for an appointment and giving my address and asking for hers. I hoped that the woman had notified the Post Office of her changed address, and placed not a little confidence in the searching qualities of the New York post office employés. To my great astonishment I had a reply the next day, and an address was given of a house I had passed twenty times in my search.
However, to the Montgomery Street house I directed my steps that evening. On the way I was overtaken by a heavy rain and looked more like a wet rat than a man when I knocked at the door. I confess that I thought more of getting dry than of the cause of my errand. Curious, but personal discomfort makes one forget all remote considerations; the whole man is taken possession of by the desire to get his bearings, to right himself—much like the swinging pendulum when an accident has crippled the machine that sets it in motion.
As soon as I entered Mrs. Baum's house and told who I was, I took off my coat, with her permission, and hung it on the back of a chair which I pushed near the kitchen stove, while I seated myself thereon and tried to regain my wits.
The woman was alone. The children were at some kind neighbours. Oh! how painful it was to see her at a little table near the window trying to make bunches of artificial flowers! How she twisted and turned the wires with one hand, with the left, while with the stump of the crippled right she kept the bunch on the table. She had encased the stump of her broken arm in a frame of wood so as to suffer less when working. She used her teeth, her chin, forehead, knees and armpits to help form a bunch, and the work went slowly, slowly. So little did she earn that she did not care to stop when a guest came, though I felt right along that she was consumed with curiosity. She lived in one room, which was kitchen, dining-room, and bedroom for her and the children, and also workroom. It did not take me very long to get dry, but it took less time for my coat to catch fire. Before I had time to put out the fire the whole back was gone. I had a hard time to keep the woman quiet on her chair. A cry of fire would have created a holocaust in that fire-trap.
When all was quiet again, I sent a neighbour's boy to my home to bring me another coat, while I seated myself near the table and began my questioning. But I had no luck. A knock at the door was followed by the entrance of a matron who immediately asked me who I was. I answered her very politely that I had business of my own with the lady and was not obliged to answer to strangers.
"Who is that man?" was now the question put to the crippled woman, who was just twisting a rose with her stump.
"I don't know," she said, shrugging her shoulders.
"You don't know?" sarcastically. "You don't know who the man is who sits near you in his shirtsleeves?"